Nvidia's Current List of RTX 2080-Optimized Games Is Pretty Short

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, 2080, and 2070 announcement was full of promising performance figures for games supporting real-time ray tracing through the company’s RTX platform. But with hardware shipping in less than one month and no RTX-enabled games currently available, the big question is: How long will enthusiasts have to wait before experiencing this new technology? We still don’t know. Some of Nvidia’s partners on the Gamescom show floor weren’t yet up to speed on their collaboration, while those who knew about it weren’t at liberty to discuss timing.

There are quite a few games with planned ray tracing support, though. According to Nvidia, this is the current list:

Little is known about Nvidia's DLSS implementation at this point, other than it employs 64 jittered sample rendering, accelerated by the Turing architecture's tensor cores. Overlap between Nvidia's lists means that five games will support both Turing-class features.

We’ll undoubtedly get more information about Nvidia’s developer relations efforts in the days leading up to retail availability of GeForce RTX cards. And we expect Nvidia to provide RTX-enabled content to flavor our review of its new cards. But for now, GeForce RTX’s performance in existing rasterized games remains the big mystery keeping many enthusiasts from placing a pre-order. Nvidia avoided drawing comparisons to its Pascal-based cards in more traditional workloads, while pushing the price of its flagship Founders Edition board up by more than 70 percent.

Although the visual impact of real-time ray tracing is truly immense, the company needs quick adoption of its RTX platform and big speed-ups in today’s games to justify upgrades. We suspect we'll know more about both soon, but for the moment, there's still a lot about the performance and feature compatibility about these new cards that we still don't yet know.